It appears, then, that Jennings might be onto something. Of course, infrastructure is just one issue, but if the thoughts and opinions of Republican Party leaders were actually indicative of what the party electorate thought, campaigning to the left of Hillary Clinton should have dissuaded Republican voters from supporting Trump. A critic of this rationale might argue that there are other issues that may be more important to right-wing voters, like abortion or immigration, so infrastructure spending is not the sort of thing that would dissuade a Trump voter.
However, I intend to argue that issues and policy are not terribly important to voters at all; generally speaking, voters make decisions based on partisan considerations and little else. In turn, this method of decision-making creates an atmosphere in which elected officials, once in office, are not held accountable for any decisions they make or policies they create. That three-fourths of Americans supported an infrastructure spending bill should have meant that Trump’s promise to spend freely on such projects was a bipartisan slam-dunk. However, with the exception of a PDF posted to the White House website (https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/FY19-Budget-Fact-Sheet_Infrastructure-Initiative.pdf), no infrastructure bill has been presented or voted on. It seems, though, that Trump’s support has faltered very little as a result. His core supporters still largely support him.
I will demonstrate just how little voters actually know or care about their own ideologies. Prominent political scientists have written in-depth studies about voter beliefs and behavior, and these studies will be used to demonstrate just how paper-thin most voters’ ideologies are. In fact, most voters do not hold any cogent ideologies at all, identifying instead along partisan lines.
Second, I will show the effects of this “ideological innocence” on elections, and by extension, legislation. Ideological innocence is a term used by Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe (adopted from Philip Converse) to describe how most voters are unable to describe a conservative or liberal ideology, but will readily identify themselves as one of the two. When politicians can be confident that their chances of election or reelection rely heavily on their party identification, and that the constituents generally don’t know or care what is happening in statehouses, they have little incentive to govern in a way that best represents their districts, or even to keep promises that were made on the campaign trail. Legislators will respond to the most active and outspoken voters, who also tend to be the most ideologically polarized.
Finally, I will discuss what solutions we may be able to bring to bear on this problem. We cannot force people to get involved or pay attention, so is there a way solve this? If voters are irrational actors, would less democracy be a suitable solution to America’s polarization problem? Political scientists like Jonathan Rauch would argue that yes, America may have too much democracy. However, I will argue that the answer lies not with restricting democracy, but with learning how to treat our democratic norms with a reverence that is becoming of a free and decent population.
In his seminal work, The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics, Philip E. Converse decides not to depend on the term “ideology” at all, choosing instead to wield the term belief system. He defines a belief system as “a configuration of ideas and attitudes in which the elements are bound together by some form of constraint or functional interdependence.” That is something of a mouthful, so let’s unpack it. Converse describes it himself, and gives an enlightening example: in a static case, “constraint” may be taken to mean the success we would have in predicting, given initial knowledge that an individual holds a specified attitude (emphasis added), that he holds certain further beliefs and attitudes. For example, if a person is opposed to the expansion of Social Security, he is probably conservative and is probably opposed as well to any nationalization of private industries, federal aid to education, sharply progressive income taxation, and so forth (Converse, The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics, 3). This is how we can assume a rational, ideologically-motivated voter would think. However, we know that this ideological consistency is very rarely the case. You can probably think of at least one person you know who, for example, is opposed to the Affordable Care Act but strongly favors, possibly even receives, Medicare benefits. Another person may support the deportation of DACA recipients or illegal immigrants, but stop short at supporting the removal of their co-workers or friends who fit that description.
In The American Voter, Converse and his colleagues from the University of Michigan laid out the “Michigan Model”. The gist of the study is that most voters are the “low-information” sort: they know very little, and care even less. Lee Drutman points out in the August 2017 edition of Washington Monthly that the 2016 election cycle began with most pundits and “experts” predicting certain failure for Donald Trump because he was “not a real conservative”. Conventional wisdom held that a severe ideologue would win the nomination and that Donald Trump would retreat back to his reality TV show. What we now know (and Converse and his ilk may have predicted) is that voters who identified Republican largely did not care that Trump was not an ideologue and had not elucidated any wonky policy proposals. A voter’s party is part of their identity, it could even be said that he or she views their preferred party as their team, and winning is what matters most. Winning justifies your choices. Trump talked about “winning” and “losing”. He was a fighter, and he won (Lee Drutman, “Tribalists and Ideologues”, Washington Monthly).
\Returning to Converse, the Michigan Model, originally published in 1960, is a theory of voter choice that suggests that voters make their decisions based on sociological considerations and party identification. These are things like social identity, demographic differences, other social groups (church, school, etc.), values, and long-term socialization. An astute reader may have noticed that all of these factors are based in identity, how a person sees themselves. Social identities or values may not be inherently political, but they are factors that lead to a person choosing a political party. Once a person has chosen a party, the choices they make following that decision are filtered through their party identification, it serves as a heuristic, or shortcut, for rational decision making, but has very little to do with acquiring information about any particular candidate or issue. According to the study, partisanship, not ideology, is the strongest predictor of how a person will vote.
In their study, described in 2017’s Neither Liberal Nor Conservative, Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe looked for changes in voter behavior since Converse’s time, but found quite the opposite. However, there was one very substantial change: ideological and partisan identification has become more consistent since 1960. The percentage of Americans who think of themselves as Democrats and liberals, or as Republicans and conservatives, has grown from 26.5% in 1972 to 44.3% in 2012. Does this negate Converse’s findings? Not really.
Instead, this is indicative of a “belief dilemma”. Republicans who heretofore had thought of themselves as liberals might have become concerned, if they were paying attention, that their party was shifting to the right on abortion or race or some other matter of importance to them. In symmetrical fashion, Democrats who heretofore had thought of themselves as conservative might have become concerned, if they were paying attention, that their party was moving to the left on abortion or race or on some other matter of importance to them (Kinder, et al, 89). To remedy this dissonance, citizens could either alter their partisanship or their ideological positions. It is likely, according to cognitive consistency theory (Kinder, et al; Abelson 1968), that the less psychologically central attitude will be the one to change. Remember that partisan choice is a part of an individual’s identity, not easily altered or changed. Americans tend to resolve this dilemma by modifying their ideological identity. They will adjust their ideology to fit their partisanship (Kinder, et al).
Critics of Converse and his model may argue that voting out of party identification is rational, after all. If a voter chooses to affiliate themselves with a political party based on the indicators mentioned above, then it stands to reason that the candidates of that party will represent positions that most closely resemble the conclusions that voter would come to if they were more informed. In The Reasoning Voter, Samuel Popkin, a political scientist from UCSD, discusses this “low-information rationality”. Popkin claims that voters have premises, and they use those premises to make inferences from their observations of the world around them. They think about who and what political parties stand for; they think about the meaning of political endorsements; they think about what government can and should do. And the performance of government, parties, and candidates affects their assessments and preferences (Samuel L. Popkin, The Reasoning Voter, 7). He claims that voters are not wholly uninformed or uncaring, but that they are incentivized to make certain issues more important than others. Voters may not know much about how the stock market is doing, but they are certainly intimately familiar with their own financial situations. Voters are busy, and it may not be rational to dedicate the time necessary to be fully informed on every issue (Popkin calls the time required to gather information the “cost” of voting). What makes an issue central are voters’ motivations to gather information about it, the conditions from which they will get that information, and the beliefs by which they connect the issue to their own lives and to the office for which they are voting (Popkin, 15). This is, on its face, a reasonable (if not necessarily rational) method of decision-making. However, Popkin also admits that voters “are not always aware of what the government is or could be doing, and often they do not know the relationship between government actions and their own utility incomes,” and that “government is motivated by voters’ opinions, not their welfare, since their opinions about their welfare are what influence voting.” Given the many gaps in voters’ information about government, and their lack of theory with which to make connections between government actions and their benefits, governments concerned primarily with gaining as many votes as possible (note: a basic tenet of the United States’ winner-take-all system) have little incentive to maximize benefits for voters (Popkin, 13).
This is reminiscent of our example regarding infrastructure, and indeed, Trump’s election and presidency as a whole. The president has failed to act in a manner consistent with serving the voters’ wishes (or their best interests), yet among his core, Republican-identified voters, his support remains strong. Popkin, in his effort to save voters, has confirmed Converse’s point. It is likely that, regardless of how Trump performs, he will still have strong support among Republican-identified voters. Remember his very candid remarks about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue? Trump is not an exception to this rule; candidates are rewarded by voter turnout and partisan posturing. They are not, however, incentivized to act in a way that yields positive results. In fact, it is quite the opposite.
This reality is demonstrated in the work of Frances Lee, a political scientist from the University of Maryland. Lee points out that since 1980, elections have become highly competitive, and one reason for this is the highly partisan atmosphere that exists in today’s politics. The “winner-takes-all” nature of the electoral system in the United States lends itself to a two-party system, and partisan concerns have begun to overtake policy concerns. Because competition is so fierce, and every election raises the prospect of the “other” party taking control of government, there is little incentive for the parties to work together (Lee, pg. 779).
Voters, in large part, will choose a candidate based on which letter appears after their name, so elected officials know they benefit more from thwarting the party in power and activating their own base by resisting the “enemy”. Of course, this leads to crippling gridlock in government. An opposition party will work to stall or kill any legislation, no matter how beneficial it may be to their constituents, if the passing of that legislation will reflect positively on a president from the opposing party. Presidents who hold office while the opposition party holds majorities in the legislative branch can do very little to permanently enshrine any policies, as cooperation is needed from both parties (due to supermajority rules in the Senate).
The problem has gone so beyond the pale that legislators will vote against their own bills just to deny the president a political win. An example, set forth by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein in their book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, is that of a January 2010 deficit reduction resolution that had sweeping bipartisan support, including Republicans like John McCain and Mitch McConnell. McConnell even issued a public statement of support for the proposal from the Senate floor. On January 26, the Senate blocked the resolution; among those who voted against it: John McCain and Mitch McConnell, as well as six Republican cosponsors of the bill. They blocked a resolution they had expressed support for, even cosponsored, simply because Barack Obama supported it; they could not let the President get a political win (Mann, et al, 4).
Were McConnell or McCain punished by voters for their duplicity and chicanery? In 2014, Mitch McConnell was reelected with 56% of the vote in deeply red Kentucky (per Wikipedia). In 2016, McCain won reelection in his state (Arizona) with 53.7% of the vote. It is certainly possible that this issue was of little import to voters in those states, justifying Popkin’s apologist stance, but it also confirms Converse’s claim that voters generally care very little about ideology or consistency. McConnell and McCain both gambled, correctly, that resistance to Barack Obama was more beneficial to their careers in the Senate than actually serving the interests or wishes of the voters. Party over policy.
Jonathan Rauch has a problem with a system that allows this sort of breakdown of norms. An author and senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, Rauch calls what is happening now “chaos syndrome”. To Rauch, the problem lies in the system’s decline in capacity for self-organization. When reforms (like campaign finance reform and changes to the nominating process) were passed that effectively and expressly made the electoral system in America more democratic , the traditional institutions and brokers of power - parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees - were less able to hold politicians accountable. Primary reform opened the door to to highly motivated extremists and interest groups, with the “perverse” result of leaving moderates underrepresented. Finance reform did not get money out of politics, but instead diverted it to private channels. Committees, much maligned today as a symbol of bureaucracy and big government, encouraged cooperation, rewarded teamwork with appointments and ensured that the people at the top were experienced and could play well with others. Closed-door negotiations, while not desirable, were conducive to compromise and allowed members to vote anonymously, with no concern for partisan considerations. Even something as objectionable as pork-barrel spending was a tool for cooperation and compromise (Rauch). Essentially, Rauch argues, things were better when there was a power structure that would have kept those unwilling to “play ball” out of the game completely. Too much democracy has opened the door to partisan, antisocial political behavior. The politics of resistance, of party over policy, and a lack of consistent ideology have played a crucial role in destroying democratic norms, and the extremists in government have not been held accountable for what they have broken.
It is not just extremists and outsiders who engage in disruptive, partisan behavior. Mitch McConnell and John McCain are certainly not political amateurs or outsiders, they are career politicians who understand what it takes to get elected or reelected. To put it plainly, getting elected or reelected requires convincing voters that you have met their demands. It requires making voters feel good about their representatives. It follows, then, that obstructionism, gridlock, and partisan struggle is precisely what voters want. To claim that legislators are acting in a manner that is opposed to their constituents’ wishes is a mistake. Voters overwhelmingly express dissatisfaction with congressional gridlock; according to a 2013 Gallup poll, 78% of Americans disapproved of the way Congress was handling their jobs. However, in 2014, 95% of incumbents were reelected (opensecrets.org). These two contradicting facts show that voters are not voting in a way that reflects their expressed wishes. Another enlightening statistic is this one from 2016, courtesy of Pew Research Center: 49% of Republicans and 55% of Democrats report being “afraid” of the other party, while 57% and 58%, respectively, report being “frustrated” by their opposition. These numbers rise considerably when voters with high levels of political engagement are taken into account, increasing to 62% of Republicans and 70% of Democrats reporting being “afraid” of the other party. Additionally, 47% of Republicans say Democrats are “immoral”, and 70% of Democrats say Republicans are “close-minded”. These polls indicate a high level of vitriol among the American electorate towards the other parties, and indicates that party identification has a stronger influence on voter choice than other rational causes. Voters like the antagonistic behavior; this explains some of Trump’s core appeal. McCain, McConnell, and virtually every other legislator, are surely aware of this. The partisan behavior all too prevalent in the halls of Congress today is, in practice, a reaction to the incentives put in place by voters.
The situation seems bleak. How can we remedy a problem that does not necessarily spring from institutional flaws? We cannot physically compel voters to stop being partisan or to develop and act in a more cooperative or ideologically consistent way. We know that voter choice is motivated largely by how they identify themselves, so can we put systems in place that will minimize the effects of partisan action? Is it even appropriate to do so?
Furthermore, the most ideological voters would do well to abandon their demands for “purity” and begin to build coalitions. Coalitions require cooperation by definition, and as cooperation grows, so to will the coalitions. As this happens, their views get tempered by the number of differing voices under their tent. The large coalitions that form are likely to discover that cooperation benefits all parties involved, and they would become more willing to cooperate with opposing parties that they may have viewed simply as barriers before.
Ideologues are important parts of a coalition, just as the moderating forces would be, but as it stands now, many parties are torn apart internally by these same ideologues (think of what the Tea Party or Trump’s uncompromising followers have done to the Republican Party). Yes, it is true that Republicans currently hold the office of the president, as well as the Senate, but at what cost did they acquire this power? Their tactics have caused a backlash and they lost their majority in the House. For their troubles, they run a government that is once again mired in gridlock, as both parties simply push against each other in blind resistance.
Only the most extreme candidates on either side are likely to “pass” any arbitrary ideological purity test, and as we found out in the 2016 election (when Bernie Sanders voters refused to vote for Hillary Clinton), the perfect can become the enemy of the good. It is incredibly short-sighted to vote out of protest against the candidate that best reflects our own views simply because they do not share all of our views. I wonder how a vast majority of those “Never Hillary” voters feel about Donald Trump?
Levitsky and Ziblatt discuss coalition building in their book: building coalitions that extend beyond our natural allies can be difficult. It requires a willingness to set aside, for the moment, issues that we deeply care about. If progressives make positions on issues such as abortion rights or single-payer health care a “litmus test” for coalition membership, the chances for building a coalition that includes evangelicals and Republican business executives will be nil. We must lengthen our time horizons, swallow hard, and make tough concessions. This does not mean abandoning the causes that matter to us. It means temporarily overlooking disagreements in order to find common moral ground (Levitsky, et al, 212).
This solution seems impossible. How can we expect either party to attempt to find “common moral ground” with people they fear, are frustrated by, or think immoral? As I have mentioned throughout, party preference is largely a part of a person’s identity, and that is not something that is easily set aside for the sake of “common moral ground”. Remember Kinder and Kalmoe’s findings on “belief dilemmas”. How can we reasonably expect voters to overcome long-standing, and likely subconscious, thought patterns that force humans to fight cognitive dissonance by modifying their ideologies to fit their chosen party?
We can take solace in the knowledge that the country has not always been this polarized. If things were once different and those with opposing views could still reach an understanding, then it is not impossible that that could happen again. Of course, just because there was more agreement in Converse’s time does not mean that policy decisions were always good ones. It could mean, however, that voters did not always look at members of the other party as enemies to be thwarted. I am very skeptical that we can ever overcome our tendencies to strongly identify as one party or the other, but I do believe that we can get back to a point where we all accepted facts and understood that most Americans just want what they think is best for the country. Partisanship is a drug, but there are always treatment plans for addiction. And just like detoxification from drugs, the journey might not be easy, but it isn’t impossible. I do not know for certain what the journey will entail, but I simply must believe we will come out of it with the foresight to put our party identities in perspective and the decency to stop treating each other like enemies.
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